Friday, June 02, 2006

How to Become an Insurgent

With his insatiable need to drop cluster bombs on innocent people, Tony Blair has often been accused of being a military adventurer, particularly by yours truly. However, even from a purely military point of view his constant aggressive wars since he came to power have made Britain less safe defensively. Yes, the SAS are particularly well-honed, having been on active duty constantly since this blood-thirsty murderer came to power, but you can't defend the whole of Britain from a sustained attack with a single special forces unit, no matter how well-trained or motivated. What you need, when the EU Wehrmacht eventually invades, are muck-and-bullets infantry slugging it out in the hills.

But would you join the infantry? Now? After basic training you'll be straight onto a plane to Iraq, given shoddy personal armour, and then constantly shot at and bombed by an inflicted population who hate you. What puzzles me, of course, is why we call them insurgents. We are the insurgents, and it is their land we have insurged. And then when your coffin gets shipped back home, a junior government minister, who would rather be engaged in Ugandan discussions with his secretary, will drape a Union Jack over you at Northolt. What fun!

It may be one thing to serve the Queen and defend your own land from socialist invasion; many young men in Britain are quite prepared to do that. But to defend a hare-brained Washington-hatched plot to take over the world and make it safer for neoconservative social democracy? Please, as the Americans say, give me a break.

Hence the ramped-up advertising campaigns here in Britain to get young men to volunteer to be killed to sustain Tony Blair's career to get rich in America. Every time I turn round I get hit by another army advert, but now I know they're getting desperate because they're starting to fill these adverts with pictures of beaches in Cyprus and scantily-clad female soldiers on close-contact recreational duty. Oh dear.

The army spent £25 million pounds of your money on recruitment advertising last year, and this year will spend much more to try to fill up the increasing shortfalls. My advice? If you do want to serve the Queen and defend these shores, join the Navy or the RAF instead. They don't need to advertise and they don't get shot at by invaded people defending themselves from foreign insurgents calling themselves the British Army.